Subscribers count!

We're happy to announce that we've recently started sharing FriendFeed subscriber counts when we crawl for the latest version of your blog's feed.

So if you have 200 people subscribed to you on FriendFeed, and you've added your blog as a service on FriendFeed, now you can see those subscribers right alongside the subscriber counts from Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo, and anyone else subscribed to your blog's feed.

When you add your blog as a service on FriendFeed, you're putting your words in front of a lot more people. But how many? Well, for me, it's:

Keep in mind though, that even though this is the number of people who are subscribed to you, the number of people who actually see your posts within FriendFeed can be substantially higher, because whenever one of your subscribers 'likes' or comments on one of your items, that item gets shared with their friends as well!

13 comments:

Scabr said...

Good move.Me's monitoring Google PageRank for FF pages too.

Denton Gentry said...

I'm not sure this is really accurate. Though a couple hundred people are subscribed to me on friendfeed, there are essentially no referrals to my blog from friendfeed.com. None of those friendfeed subscribers are really interested in my blog, they're apparently interested in some other aspect of my feed or my comments. It seems misleading to lump them in with RSS subscribers, a sizable fraction of whom actually do access each posting in their RSS reader.

If I tweet every article, I don't think it would be accurate to say all twitter followers are subscribers. If I submitted every blog post to reddit, that doesn't mean I could say all reddit users are blog subscribers. Twitter and reddit don't show the same level of intent as an RSS subscription... and neither does friendfeed, really.

Doug Cornelius said...

I agree with Denton. I checked my numbers as well over the last few months and got 10 referrals from FriendFeed out of 7,000.

The other side is that I push out a full feed, so those subscribers are getting the content. They are the equivalent of site visitors. Friendfeed merely publishes the headline so that is a very different kind of subscription.

bartm said...

Concerning your last remark, Kevin, are you planning on tracking that kind of numbers as well?
E.g. amount of likes and comment impressions for a post, amount of subscribers and non-subscribers reached (= unique users reached by means of likes or comments that showed up)

It might be nice to see how many people were reached (with the knowledge they may not have given it any attention).

Anonymous said...

The truth is that people don't subscribe to your blog like they subscribe to FriendFeed. I would like to be able to turn this feature off so I don't have to deal with inflated numbers in FeedBurner.

Jarred said...

wow, this doubled out subscriber count. nice to know!

Andy Beard said...

I had close to 5000 RSS subscribers before, and referrals from RSS hardly figure in my referral stats.

I can understand all the detractors, but ultimately Feedburner wasn't accurate anyway, all this does is makes another sphere of influence measurable.

Here is an example...

Robet Scoble probably visits my blog once a year, but every now and then I see one of my posts, or a tweet "liked"

Is Robert reading? yes, though he now monitors a lot more streams than when he was just reading a few 1000 RSS feeds daily.

People are moving away from conventional RSS and adopting new forms.

If you want to measure pure RSS, why not use something other than Feedburner, and use Feedburner as an aggregate.

Anonymous said...

I'm confused: how do I add my blog as a service on FriendFeed? Just sign up for a new account and add it as the only shared item/service? Or am I missing something else?

Unknown said...

Same question here: Am I blind or just don't see the obvious. Where do I get these numbers and the stats?

Reid said...

This is almost unarguably inaccurate. The subscriber count in Feedburner gives you the approximate number of people who are actively subscribed to your Feedburner feed.

The reach statistic is where the Friendfeed numbers should be counted, not subscribers. You're right that it's a lot of eyes, but so is my music blog being shown on Hype Machine, and it would be totally wrong to count every registered user of Hype Machine as a "subscriber" to my music blog just because it feeds in through the site.

It's sloppy, too. It seems to simply be taking the number of subscribers to my Friendfeed and counting them as "subscribers", even though I know that a lot of those people haven't looked at their Friendfeed account in months.

This will be good news for the people who value high numbers over quality information, though. But hopefully Google/Feedburner will exlude the friendfeedagg from the subscriber stats.

Neil said...

I'm confused - is the graphic shown in your post a tool that we can access at FriendFeed? Or is it from elsewhere?

Anonymous said...

If people are being exposed to my blog headlines, no matter if it’s on an RSS reader or FriendFeed, they should be counted as potential audience. At the end of the day, the much more important metric to measure is the actual visits to your blog and how often they visit afer that. I've posted some thoughts about it here http://bit.ly/N0jQc

Unknown said...

Did something change? This was working great until today when I noticed a big drop in my Feed Burner stats for # of subscribers. In fact I don't even see FriendFeed as a source anymore.